How close are we to the holy grail of room-temperature superconductors?
forbes.com
forbes.com
Furthermore, a super-conducting belt around the Earth would greatly mitigate solar and wind energy's Achilles heel; intermittency.
Renewable power, generated elsewhere, could become accessible in the calm of a windless night. Grid storage? Thanks, no need.
Consider what would happen if the technology failed, and it suddenly transitioned to normal conduction.
Sounds like a great SF story, even if the actual effect is minimal. (I haven’t done the back of the envelope calculation :)
Why generated elsewhere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
"However, it seems that practical applications remain significantly far off. Achieving superconductivity at mundane temperatures but extreme pressures is not significantly more accessible than achieving it at mundane pressures but extreme temperatures;"
It's a better silver bullet than fusion (and would unlock fusion too).
Is it “only” better transport of electricity, or would completely new things become possible?
Magnetic levitation (Meissner-Ochsenfeld) would also not require such low temperatures.
Even Quantum computing using superconducting qubits might become easier (although there, superconductivity is not the main reason for low temperatures).
"Only" better conductivity is a big deal, after all.
[0]https://www.powermag.com/superconductor-motor-for-navy-passe...
This article[3] goes into some of the advantages of a less restrictive setup, but the laser-pumped sensors they rely on still require a lot of additional hardware.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoencephalography
[3]: https://hebergement.universite-paris-saclay.fr/supraconducti...
It could likely be done with ordinary cables, but the power loss would be significant.
The big problem in fusion is containing and shaping the plasma without any instabilities. If we had room-temperature superconductors, the smallest current through a superconducting magnet would generate a very large magnetic field, enough to shape any plasma.
I very much doubt room temperature superconductors would ever be used in consumer electronics. They probably wouldn't even be widely used in data centers outside of truly cutting edge "no expense spared" systems.
From the top my head, most power is dissipated in switching, then leakage (for that we would actually need higher resistance in the transistors) and only then resistive losses in powerlines.
Interesting, I stand corrected then!
There are many limits in current HTS-- like it's hard to build coils out of brittle ceramics-- so having alternatives would be very useful, so perhaps that's what you meant?
Even Niobium-tin only gets there via clever manufacturing techniques (e.g. the internal-tin process; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niobium%E2%80%93tin#Niobium_ti... ).
Is ductile HTS a major research target too, or even believed to be possible? Or is the hope that by studying RTS' we'll stumble into something that can be manufactured by chance or gain some deeper understanding of their behavior that let us design more useful materials? It seems the media spills the most ink on room temp but I agree than LN2 temp but able to be formed would be more important-- I think if YBCO worked at -70C it still would not see that much commercial use.
if anyone knows better I would like to know why or why not this is an possibility
Erasing bits consumes power. You'll probably want to start investigating conservative logic:
>Conservative logic is a comprehensive model of computation which explicitly reflects a number of fundamental principles of physics, such as the reversibility of the dynamical laws and the conservation of certain additive quantities (among which energy plays a distinguished role). Because it more closely mirrors physics than traditional models of computation, conservative logic is in a better position to provide indications concerning the realization of high-performance computing systems, i.e., of systems that make very efficient use of the "computing resources" actually offered by nature. In particular, conservative logic shows that it is ideally possible to build sequential circuits with zero internal power dissipation
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos576/p...
...and also reversible computation:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...
Hm, he has a blog [0], but it’s on Medium.
Byt yes, major science breakthroughs don't happen in a day or even a year, or 10.
Sometimes they happen in a day. But major engineering breakthroughs, now that's hard, because you have to build the thing.
Take flight as an example. People had been experimenting with it probably since the first human saw a bird and wanted to be able to do that. That went exactly nowhere until someone built a kite large enough to support the weight of a (light) human. And since then every few hundred years there was some kind of 'breakthrough', each of which building on probably hundreds or even thousands of failures in the intermediate. Until finally the Wright Brothers made their first powered flight and then we were off to the races. If not for all those failures and all of those baby steps the revolution wouldn't have happened when it did. The Wrights had a number of pre-requisite inventions at their disposal and as much as theirs was the true breakthrough without those other inventions they'd be sitting on a beach playing in the sand.
It's layer upon layer of failure, the occasional step of real and measurable progress and even rarer a real breakthrough.
AI was wandering in the wilderness just like fusion, a theory without results or practicality. But first alexnet in 2012, then transformers in 2017, and we are now at the stage where "AI is moving too fast and we must pause it!!!"
Who knows, maybe the alexnet of superconductors is lurking somewhere.
I disagree. The problem isn't the technology, but that for once we have something that demands more deliberate use. LLMs directly confront the literacy gap between the most and least educated members of the public, and I really do mean that in all senses of the word "literacy".
It will be quite a while before we get super conductors produced reliably.Of course the prerequisite is that a true super conductor is really created, in a lab condition, is going to take quite some time.
Yes he worked incrementally. He also invented ways to manufacture and create markets for his novel inventions.
We do have working super conductors produced at scale, some of which are just 'boring' alloys. The problem is that the cryogenics required for operation are expensive and complex, making them not very appealing for widespread use.
* (useful) Fusion
* Room Temperature Superconductors
* (useful) Quantum Computers
There's always breakthroughs but nothing seems to ever come out of it. Will they ever happen? Maybe. That said I've got a degree in theoretical physics and I'd bet against all three within my lifetime.
Eg there's no way to verify Hawking radiation in person (because well, good luck getting near a black hole to do so). But it's still supported by existing models of physics, thus it is science and not mere speculation.
Another recent example would be that the idea of time crystals was a theoretical physics result, backed by existing physics. That backing made it more than just speculation, leading to the investment of resources that eventually led to them actually being created.
Of course probably the most famous example of a theoretical physicst would be Einstein.
Lots of stuff typically goes through theoretical physicists before experimentalists determine how to test the idea. For example, all the particle accelerators, synchrotrons etc are initially designed by theoretical physicists via simulations etc to meet certain goals before putting in the billions of dollars it costs to actually translate those designs into something that can be built and used.
But even if you ignore that, or don't believe me, or whatever...
You're conflating two different meanings of "speculative" here, which I think is probably whence your confusion stems.
On the one hand, you're (reasonably) saying that theoretical physics is speculative, in the sense that, once you finish your modelling work, your output could be said to be a speculation about what would happen in an experiment.
On the other hand, you're (again, reasonably!) describing certain proposed engineering projects as speculative, in the sense that if someone says "we'll have economically viable fusion within N years", that's a speculation.
My point is that those are just very different types of speculation, they really don't have much to do with one another. It's perfectly reasonable to be someone who wants to use theoretical (a.k.a. model-based, a.k.a. speculative) techniques to try to advance human knowledge about the nature of reality, while also being someone who is skeptical about the practicality of various (speculative) proposed exploitations of that knowledge. "I'd like to advance physics in areas P and Q; I don't think engineering is likely to advance in areas X, Y, and Z".
For example, Einstein was a theoretical physicist (very much not an experimentalist). He wasn't (initially) particularly bullish on the plausibility of doing engineering based on his work (and when it became clear that atomic bombs were gonna happen, he was horrified). For a later famous example of theoretical physics, Peter Higgs (and others who did the same work) were not concerned with whether or not it would be possible to design an experiment to validation the existence of the Higgs Boson, while still being vaguely hopeful that someone might one day figure out that experiment (using equipment invented decades after the proposal of the Higgs mechanism).
ALSO, btw, just because someone is a theoretical physicist doesn't mean they don't think that they're uninterested in experimental validation. It means they're not working on experimental validation. Maybe someone else will figure out how to do experiments, maybe not, it's just not the theorist's problem.
To elaborate on my agreement with you....
There's a fundamental tension between "news" and "incremental". Which means that in many many important areas of human enterprise (and progress), the "news" model is fundamentally counterproductive. So don't consume the news.
Instead, read a new textbook every year (or however often you can afford to).
But it generally seems like a good idea, similar to headlines ending with a question mark.
otherwise an ambient temperature superconductor would be a perpetual motion machine